Adaptation in the digital era: The case of Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf

From fidelity discourse, through medium specificity discourse, to intertextuality and remediation approach, adaptation studies have dynamically evolved and recently have responded with particular flexibility to the advent of the digital era. Even adaptations of classical literary texts, confronting the authority of their hypotexts, have daringly broken away from their fidelity constraints and ventured onto paths facilitated by the development of new media. This article discusses Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 adaptation of Beowulf and examines this film’s potential for illustrating the manifestations of digitality in adaptation discourses. A film that did not make it (in)to the box office, and an adaptation that makes literary fans cringe, it is still a fascinating cultural intertext: a radical reinterpretation of the Old English heroic poem, a star-studded special-effect cinematic extravaganza of an adventurous director, an illustration of adaptation going remediation and an inclusive transmedia hybrid.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978)

USA Director Robert Zemeckis Runtime 99 minutes Blu-ray USA, 2019 Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region A/1)

Steven’s Spectres: Stranger Things in Small-Town USA

In recent years, the 80s and the attached plethora of cultural synecdoches have been haunting various genres of American film and TV. Often both the cinematic form and the content of these recirculations are structured around tropes established in the period by directors such as Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, Robert Zemeckis, Richard Donner, Rob Reiner, Ivan Reitman and others. The paper considers the case of the Netflix TV show Stranger Things, directed by the Duffer brothers, attempting to read its spectral physiognomy and filiations, as well as to interpret its theoretical undertones in popular culture. The paper will analyze the theoretical implications between the small town of the story and the placeholder planetary spaces it is distributed to, as well as the curious palimpsest of temporalities manifest in the show’s stories, the show itself as a global product and its distribution

Deleuze's Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood: The Tripartite Cinema of Time Travel, Many Worlds and Altered States

What is called “time travel” cinema is but one aspect in a tripartite series of interweaving modes of disjunctive narration which is also – simultaneously – a cinema of “many worlds” and “altered states”. Exploiting Gilles Deleuze's three syntheses of time, space, and consciousness from Difference and Repetition (1968) allows a conceptual development of these cinematic series through three popular Hollywood film cycles beginning with Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), and Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985). In so doing, film and philosophy are deployed as two series which together create inexhaustible atemporal, aspatial, and ahuman disjunctions, ungrounding everyday spatio-temporal identities, and affirming productive images of cinematic thought.

Contato

A imagem da mulher no meio científico tem sido alvo de muitas investigações, notadamente as oriundas de análises críticas sobre o universo fílmico. Analisa-se o filme Contato, de Robert Zemeckis (1997), a partir de análise documental e de bibliografia prévia sobre o filme, como subsídio para a discussão de estereótipos sobre a figura feminina, historicamente construídos, que persistem, menos nos meios acadêmicos de ciência mas, sobretudo, na sociedade em geral. Apesar das dificuldades e lutas que a protagonista enfrenta nesta obra, nota-se que a cientista Ellie mostra inteligência, capacidade, dedicação, comprometimento, persistência e sucesso da empreitada, mesmo trabalhando com temas pouco convencionais, sendo alvo constante de críticas de colegas e superiores. Cabe destacar, entretanto, que o enredo aborda estereótipos reducionistas, típicos da época em que o filme foi produzido e que ainda parecem persistir. Este trabalho é um convite à reflexão sobre a figura feminina da cientista, e quais papeis são atribuídos a ela pela sociedade, pela mídia e, particularmente, pelo cinema, a fim de subsidiar práticas educacionais.

AN ANALYSIS THE CHARACTER OF FORREST GUMP MOVIE BY ROBERT ZEMECKIS VIEWED FROM BIG FIVE PERSONALITY TRAITS THEORY

The purpose of this research is to know the character and characterization of Forrest Gump as main character in the movie by analyzing the evidence from the dialogues and his actions in the movie. To know what the character and characterization of Forrest, the writer used the method descriptive-qualitative. The writer employs himself to collect the data by reading script, watching the movie and classifying them. The writer focused the dialogues of the movie, and then followed by classifying and analyzing the character and characterization through the big five personality theory The writer found that The Character in the movie are Forrest as Protagonist Character and Forrest as mayor Character. The Forrest character in the movie viewed the Big Five personality, Forrest have all the type of the character such as Openness, Contentiousness, Extraversion or Introversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, but the dominate of Forrest character is Agreeableness. Forrest have high agreeableness, he have the character flexible, trusting, cooperative, forgiving, empathic, soft-hearted, tolerant. Keywords: Character, big five personality

The Vietnam War, American Remembering, and the Measure of Sacrifice, Fifty Years On

Fifty years on, the American experience of the Vietnam War seems suspended between ancient history and rapidly fading cultural memory; or perhaps consigned to the vicissitudes of that habit of negotiating between history (what happened) and memory (how it is retrospectively mythologized). This chapter considers Vietnam War writings, including Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), as well as popular music and films such as Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (1994), in relation to the cultural lineage of those negotiations between history and memory. It considers literary engagements with more recent wars—such as Kevin Powers’ Iraq war novel Yellow Birds (2012)—that hark back to the Vietnam War. In discussing the war’s mythologizations and commemorations across history, the chapter explores the extent to which the Vietnam War has been seen to involve sacrifices that are politically and culturally redemptive.

Consumo, quadrinhos e cinema: a transposição do filme De volta para o futuro para as narrativas gráficas da Turma da Mônica

O presente trabalho analisa as transposições de narrativas do cinema para as histórias em quadrinhos, de forma intertextual parodiada, da Turma da Mônica, de Mauricio de Sousa. Os objetos de estudo foram as ediçõesDe volta para a historinha (Revista Cebolinha, de 1991) e Coelhada para o futuro (Clássicos do cinema - Turma da Mônica, de 2013) que parodiam o filme sobre viagens no tempo, De volta para o futuro (Back to the future, 1985), do diretor Robert Zemeckis. A pesquisa é classificada como descritiva, com abordagem qualitativa. As análises das obras em quadrinhos são feitas a partir das seguintes dimensões: as referências diretas ao filme, a autorreferência, a referência a outras obras reconhecíveis dentro ou fora do contexto de viagens no tempo e questões transculturais. Os resultados apontam para práticas intertextuais entre o cinema e as histórias em quadrinhos, considerando estas como incentivos ao consumo midiático de narrativas gráficas da Turma da Mônica.

Make-Believing Animated Films Featuring Digital Humans: A Qualitative Inquiry Using Online Sources

A qualitative inquiry of reviews of films featuring digital humanlike characters was performed by sampling user comments from three online reviewer aggregator sites: the Internet Movie Database, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. The films chosen for analysis were: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (dir. Hironobu Sakaguchi and Motonori Sakakibara, 2001), The Polar Express (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2004), and Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2007), all produced using CGI animation, together with A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, 2006) whose visuals are depicted by rotoscoping using Bob Sabiston’s Rotoshop software. The authors’ analysis identified individual differences in the viewing experience, particularly in relation to the uncertain ontology of the humanlike characters created using CGI (CGI-Humans). They found examples of reviews indicating an inability to distinguish between real and CGI-Human actors, observations of characters transiently exhibiting realism before returning to their artifice, and of characters being viewed as eerie (analogous to the uncanny valley), thus illustrating a complex and dynamic response to this phenomenon. In some situations, character uncanniness was related to the presence of an atypical feature such as movement of the eyes. Whilst specifically for Beowulf, perceptions became more problematic when there was familiarity with the actor playing the CGI-Human character, with some reviewers describing difficulties in categorizing the character as either real or animated. CGI-Human performances were also characterized by a lack of, or inappropriate, social interaction. Online reviewers did not perceive characters depicted using Rotoshop (Rotoshop-Humans) as eerie; rotoscoping was found to preserve, and possibly enhance, the natural social interactions between actors recorded from the live-action film which was used as the source material for the animation. The authors’ inquiry also identified user motivations for viewing these films and the importance placed by reviewers on the form of display when viewing the CGI films. They situate their interpretation of these findings in relation to Walton’s make-believe theory ( Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, 1990).